Fondation C. Gulbekian: “Talismans, the desert between us is only sand”

Paris, FranceUntil 1 July 2018

Isabelle Ferreira

This project, taking the form of exhibition, conferences, performances, projections and a publications, is organized around three axes: the dematerialisation of walls, the human reconstruction following a collapse and the talisman. The repair starts with an observation: the answers lie in singular testimony. It is often in the light of those who have survived the shocks of adversity that stands the shape of possible realities. This project gives first and foremost the voice artists and theorists, specialists of human existence.

The dematerialization of the walls is to be understood in the literal sense, as the collapse of houses in times of war or natural disaster. In the artistic context of the 1960s and 1970s, with the action of Commissioners such as Lucy Lippard, dematerialization has become an m.o. that went beyond the formal exercise. The dematerialization of art expressed the celebration of reproductive technologies, an alternative movement of the art out of the institution and the market, and especially an iteration critical of the invisibility of the Viet Nam war in the daily Americans in strategic denial of public sensitivity. The talisman works as a counter monument, an object bound to a way of life, the value of which is defined by the intersection between an intimate symbolic function and collective beliefs. This word whose mixed origin is a hybrid between Arabic and Greek, also embodies currents of reciprocal influences of civilization with a part of Europe with Portugal and France. Its operation, and its status changing, contrast and dialogue with the object of art. The talisman can take the form of an object, of a writing, a mechanism of protection and traffic. Silent, secret or explicit, he tries to channel a force to counteract another. What are the issues that each protagonist would seek to push back or channel? The talisman is examined in this perspective, less for its esoteric properties for its composite nature. The idea is also, at the same time, to destabilize a little what we consider an art object to its cast.